Koreshan SP

Our time here south of Ft Myers has been very nice. A few late afternoon rain storms with cold fronts did not dampen our time here. We were camped at Koreshan SHS which has very nice camp sites and a very interesting historic area of a turn-of-the-century communal group. As you can see from the above picture, we are also close to the beaches for some shelling opportunities: Bonita Springs beach and Lovers Key SP beach.

We visited Lovers Key for a day. The picture above shows a fallen tree on the beach whose roots have been decorated by us shellers. We also walked a 3 mile nature trail seeing lots of birds and one alligator. We were treated by an osprey with a fish attempting to take lunch back to the nest. Unfortunately, the fish was just a bit too big or the wind just a bit too strong and it couldn’t quite get it to the nest. The mate was very frustrated by this turn of events and tried to encourage it to try again. The bird sat on a branch just a few feet from the nest refusing to let the catch go. We did not wait to see the result. Hope he made it up! We planned to kayak the water trail there but the wind picked up and the clouds darkened, so we did not put the boats in.

This settlement has some good living history re-enactors here. This is a bread making demonstration of rising bread done in a dutch oven with charcoal. Yum! A local tropical fruit grower brings her preserves for us to put on the bread also, double Yum! We also attended a session of cowboy cooking with the cast ovens and pots of beans and ham, cornbread and mango crisp. Oh so good. An evening of stations where characters from the settlement were portrayed to give us some history on the group was a treat. And then there are the Sunday afternoon musicals in the Art Hall taking advantage of the 1885 Steinway piano.

Just 3 miles away (biking distance) is the Estero Bay Preserve. Above is a mocking bird (FL state bird) who sang to us as we began our walk and there was a gopher tortoise also (see slide show). The 3 mile walk was nice but much of the trail in the salt flats area was under water.

We were treated with a day visiting with our friends, Lynn and Forrest at their place in Naples. We toured Naples and Rookery Bay, and then topped the day off with a sunset tour of the Corkscrew Sanctuary. During that walk we had a juvenile barred owl fly in to the boardwalk calling for it’s parents. A few minutes later the parents called and he flew off to them where he was either soundly dressed down or enthusiastically greeted by them. ;-)

We move Sunday to Myakka Rive SP. Another park we enjoyed last year. No internet close to there but we will travel to some on the 17th because we must make our next reservation for 2011 that day.